The Words That Popped in 2013

As a Busy Year Rushed By, a Spray of Newly Coined Terms Burst Forth Around Us

By

Ben Zimmer

Updated Dec. 28, 2013 6:11 p.m. ET

Casting an eye back on 2013 through the lens of language can feel like looking at a series of bubbles: words that momentarily caught our fancy, often tied to passing trends or breaking-news stories. But those bubbles in the language almost always go "pop!" before too long, as new ones rise to take their place.

Blame the information overload brought about by new and old media ceaselessly competing for mindspace. Or blame a collective attention span that can rival that of a goldfish. It often seems that 21st-century trends in English are increasingly transient, with neologizers whipping up a linguistic churn that leaves little of permanence behind.

Rather than bemoaning the frothy and fleeting nature of new words and phrases, however, we can embrace it. The effervescence of language, the constant churning of those bubbles, serves as evidence of something more enduring: the always-present creativity of our word-making faculties, innovating in ways both serious and playful to find novel ways of labeling social phenomena and experiences.

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Molly Jacques

And at a time plagued by anxieties over how our communications are being monitored, with our data perhaps stashed away in some secret National Security Agency facility, there is great solace to be found in ephemerality. As my Wall Street Journal colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote in his tech column last week, services such as Snapchat are taking advantage of a newfound interest in "ephemeral messaging": interactions that leave hardly a trace. Let us pause to look back at some of those ephemeral messages that bubbled up in 2013.

Where better to start than with the words we use for online chatter? Since the way we converse with each other electronically is very much in flux, the metalanguage we use to talk about such talk is changing too. Those keeping track of the latest Twitter trends, for instance, would have noticed the rise of the "subtweet": Short for "subliminal tweet," it is the equivalent of talking behind someone's back, tweeting about a person without including his or her Twitter handle.

A more malicious kind of online interaction goes by the label "catfishing," which hit the news back in January, when Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o was revealed to have been the victim of an elaborate online hoax. When someone is "catfished," a love interest turns out to be nothing more than a fabricated identity on social media. MTV continues to air a reality series called "Catfish," spun off from the documentary that gave the phenomenon its name, but interest dropped precipitously after the Te'o story passed.

The Internet meme of the moment goes by the name of "doge" (a whimsical misspelling of "dog"), in which images of the fluffy Shiba Inu breed of dog are overlaid with enthusiastic, if ungrammatical, exclamations—heavy on words like "such," "much," "very" and "wow." The "doge" meme may have already run its course, though, as it has already seeped into the halls of power. Earlier this week, Rep. Thomas Massie (R, Ky.) tweeted, "Much bipartisanship. Very spending. Wow. #doge."

Politicians appropriating the latest in online slang is nothing new, though. Back in April 2012, then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton
played along with a satirical blog called "Texts from Hillary" by sending her own text to the blog. "Nice selfie," she wrote, referring to a photo that one of the blog's creators had taken of himself.

Mrs. Clinton (or rather, whichever young staffer helped her compose that text) was clearly ahead of the pack, as 2013 became the year of the "selfie." As a slangy term for a cellphone self-portrait, "selfie" originated more than a decade ago in Australia, where the "-ie" diminutive suffix runs rampant. But when even Pope Francis is posing with well-wishers for a "papal selfie," the word has clearly arrived. President
Obama
may wish the word never existed: After Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt snapped a casual photo with him at Nelson Mandela's memorial service, it sparked a mini-controversy dubbed "Selfie-gate."

In pop-culture circles, the word that made the biggest splash this year was undoubtedly "twerk." When Miley Cyrus did her rump-shaking dance at MTV's Video Music Awards in August, anyone unfamiliar with "twerking" (which actually originated two decades ago in New Orleans) got a quick primer. But within weeks, sarcastic "twerking" jokes already felt stale. "If I never hear the word 'twerk' again, it will be too soon," wrote the Salon.com writer Feminista Jones, echoing a common sentiment.

You might say that we were temporarily caught up in a "twerknado," to use a suffix that hit the big time this year. In July, the Twitterverse betrayed an unquenchable fascination with "Sharknado," a cheesy movie on the Syfy channel that, true to its billing, showcased tornadoes filled with sharks. Pretty soon everyone was jumping on the "-nado" bandwagon. Crossroads GPS, a conservative group affiliated with Karl Rove, got in on the action with a video slamming the Affordable Care Act, entitled "ObamaCareNado."

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Food-savvy New Yorkers, meanwhile, might remember 2013 as the year the 'cronut' was introduced to the world.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Food-savvy New Yorkers, meanwhile, might remember 2013 as the year the "cronut" was introduced to the world. The croissant-doughnut hybrid from Dominique Ansel's Soho bakery quickly became a must-have confection. Many sought to imitate its success, but since Ansel trademarked "cronut," the copycats had to come up with new names such as "dossant."

November saw a once-in-a-lifetime calendrical confluence, when Thanksgiving coincided with the first night of Hanukkah. But what to call this double holiday? "Hanukkahgiving," "Hanugiving" and "Turkukkah" were all proposed, but the most popular name was "Thanksgivukkah." An enterprising fourth-grader from New York came up with the "menurkey," a turkey-shaped menorah, as the perfect accessory for the day. But "Thanksgivukkah" is guaranteed to fade from memory, as the two holidays won't converge again for another 70,000 years, according to some calculations.

Even more serious news stories engendered their own transient lingo. April's Boston Marathon bombing might have seemed to be an ill-advised time for neologizing, but some attempted to popularize terms like "marabomber" and "brofiling" as the perpetrators were hunted by authorities. What is most remembered is a two-word phrase encapsulating the way the city rallied together after the tragedy: "Boston strong."

Popular culture and international affairs sometimes intersected in unexpected ways. In June, the world's attention turned to Gezi Park in Istanbul, where antigovernment protesters clashed with Turkish police. When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the demonstrators "çapulcu" ("looters"), they wore the term with pride, even adding an English verb ending to make "çapuling." "Every day I'm çapuling" became a slogan displayed on signs and T-shirts, playing off the line "Every day I'm shuffling" from the band LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem."

Despite the now-you-see-them-now-you-don't nature of many of these words, we can discern some intriguing overall patterns in the way that neologisms are formed these days. Now more than ever, "portmanteau words" that fuse two existing words are a popular way to create new mashups, such as "cronut," "sharknado" and "Thanksgivukkah." It is an easy way to convey novelty while not appearing too novel: If you can figure out the components, the meaning of a portmanteau word will be as obvious as, well, a tornado full of sharks.

Sometimes, a word-chunk that goes into building a portmanteau can become so recognizable that it can happily attach itself to other words. The "-nado" of "sharknado" achieved this special status this year, though it is still a long way off from the super-productivity of other calamitous suffixes, such as the "-mageddon" of "armageddon" or especially the "-pocalypse" of "apocalypse." When cicadas began swarming in the Northeast in the late spring, some warned of the looming "cicadapocalypse," while the extreme air pollution in Beijing and northeastern China was described this year as an "airpocalypse."

All of this word-blending can get a little out of hand, however. Take "selfie," Oxford Dictionaries's Word of the Year and the subject of endless variations. "Drelfie"? That's a drunk selfie, like the first known use of the word "selfie" by an inebriated Aussie in 2002. "Grelfie"? A group selfie. "Lelfie"? A selfie showing off your legs (following in the wake of Kim Kardashian's notorious "belfie," or bottom selfie). Then there's "shelfie," a photo showing off the contents of one's bookshelf. And for this winter, Weather.com is asking people to send in their selfies in the snow, or "snowfies."

While we may look back at 2013 and chuckle over this profusion of terms for narcissistic self-presentation, the many spinoffs of "selfie" undeniably indicate that the word itself has a certain stickiness to it. "Selfie" does well on the "FUDGE" scale introduced by Allan Metcalf in his book "Predicting New Words." "FUDGE" is his mnemonic for judging the viability of neologisms: Frequency of use, Unobtrusiveness, Diversity of users and situations, Generation of other forms and meanings, and Endurance of the concept.

Mr. Metcalf himself lauded "selfie" in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Lingua Franca blog in October, a month before Oxford Dictionaries chose it as their Word of the Year. "Selfie" is "a word that has come into its prime this year as a perfect expression of the actions and preoccupations of today's youth, the so-called millennial generation," he wrote. "You can see the millennials as they see themselves with this word."

I share a professional interest in all of this word-watching with Mr. Metcalf, as we are both involved in the American Dialect Society's own selection for Word of the Year, which will take place next week at the society's annual meeting, held in Minneapolis. Linguists, lexicographers and other scholars will be gathering to discuss research on varieties of American English, and the Word of the Year vote (WOTY to its friends) is a pleasant diversion from all the academic paper presentations.

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Molly Jacques

The ADS selection of noteworthy words has been going on since 1990 and has inspired various other WOTY votes, even some in other languages. Last year, after strenuous debate, the Twitter-friendly word "hashtag" won out over such worthy competitors as "YOLO" (an acronym for "you only live once"), "marriage equality" and "fiscal cliff." (Note that phrases and even prefixes and suffixes are acceptable as candidates, so long as they are vocabulary items that could receive dictionary treatment.)

Besides "selfie" and perhaps "twerk," what else might be in the running this year for WOTY accolades? Mr. Metcalf suggests that "Obamacare" would be a timely choice, given the troubled rollout of HealthCare.gov. While "Obamacare" was first broached by Mitt Romney back in 2007 when Barack Obama was still a senator and presidential candidate, the word's fortunes have waxed and waned since then. It was used as a cudgel against Obama in 2010, but by last year's campaign season the president and his supporters had managed to reappropriate it in a positive way. This year, however, the negative connotations of "Obamacare" have returned with a vengeance.

To those nominees I would add a few more that I predict will be remembered as more than mere word bubbles. "Drone," as I discussed in these pages in July, has been in use for unmanned aerial vehicles since the 1930s, but controversy over the Obama administration's program of covert drone strikes has extended the word in new directions. Now it can be a transitive verb, as in, "Pakistanis are tired of getting droned."

We might all get droned if Amazon's Jeff Bezos has his way, since he revealed to "60 Minutes" earlier this month that the company is planning a huge fleet of delivery drones. With all these drones flying around, some wonder about how they might be captured, in what has been dubbed "drone-jacking."

Another strong contender is "bitcoin," the virtual currency introduced in 2008 that gained a patina of respectability this year, despite the FBI's shutdown of Silk Road, an online black market that traded in bitcoin. Or should that be traded in "bitcoins"? Standard usage is still being worked out, so for now, "bitcoin" appears both as an uncountable mass noun and a countable unit.

Similar confusion reigns over Glass, Google's grand plan in wearable computing. It is still unclear whether we will be talking about people wearing Google Glass or Glasses. Either way, Glass-wearers hope to avoid the nasty epithet "Glassholes."

My sentimental favorite is actually a phrasal verb: "lean in." When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg used it as the title and mantra of her book, published in March, she put a brand-new spin on a phrase. "Leaning in" had once been mostly limited to sports such as skiing and sea kayaking before serving as a kind of physical metaphor for embracing risk and not shying away from obstacles in one's path.

With Ms. Sandberg exhorting women in the business world to "lean in," the expression has become closely connected with the idea of female empowerment. By working its way into the popular lexicon, the phrase has boldly asserted itself to stand above the more bubbly, evanescent mementos of 2013.

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